


i couldn't seem to die

by orphan_account



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Multi, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-10
Updated: 2016-02-10
Packaged: 2018-05-19 13:32:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5969016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alexander Hamilton wakes up with gunshots in his ears and a vivid recollection of a forty-nine year dream he never woke up from. He stands in the rubble of hurricane-struck Christiansted, seventeen and scrappy, with that same impossible drive to <i>write his way out.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	i couldn't seem to die

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [Sisyphus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1113651), an excellent Harry Potter fic I read a while ago. (Though with a much less bleak ending.)

Alexander Hamilton wakes up with gunshots in his ears and a vivid recollection of a forty-nine year dream he never woke up from. He stands in the rubble of hurricane-struck Christiansted, seventeen and scrappy, with that same impossible drive to _write his way out_.

So he writes a letter and it becomes famous, just like it did in his dream – _let the Sun be extinguished and the Heavens burst asunder._ He gets a scholarship to King’s College, joins the Revolution, and watches his life play out with the knowledge that his dream was prophetic.

He never tells anybody. He fears they will burn him at the stake, or use it against him.

Everything happens just as he imagines them, and it is not until 1791 that he decides he will make a change to his dream. When Maria Reynolds approaches him, he pushes her away. And that saves his reputation, saves his family, saves his relationship with Eliza.

He still falls, of course. He stood too high and refused to climb down, and when he published his pamphlet against John Adams, he toppled onto his face. He is stabbed by another Federalist before he makes it to Philip’s nineteenth birthday.

When he wakes up again on the island he realises it’s not a dream. So he continues, and when he meets his future friends he does everything he can to save them. When Laurens talks of his grand plans for a battalion, Alexander tells him to stop, that he can’t go through with it, that it’s a stupid idea. John goes to South Carolina anyway, and Alexander knows it is coming when Eliza reads the letter to him.

He lets Maria in unawaredly, only realising she had entered his life when the letter from James Reynolds arrives. He takes the speculation charge, until he decides that he won’t accept it and publishes the pamphlet. Eliza’s heart is broken from the knowledge of her husband being a lying cheater who only cares for his own skin. She dies before him in this life, and Angelica never forgives him. There is nobody here to preserve his legacy.

Philip still gets shot, but Alexander isn’t there when he takes his final breath. When he goes towards the duel and fires at the sky, he’s glad for this life to finally be over.

He wakes up remembering the feeling of dying alone, without his children or wife or family. The grief envelopes him. He doesn’t write anything in this universe, and dies young of an incurable disease without any of the sense of fulfillment he deserves.

In his fifth life, he decides he will be more careful. He won’t let anything bad happen – he’ll stay away from the danger and keep a low profile. He’ll do like Aaron Burr and _talk less, smile more_. He doesn’t retort to Samuel Seabury. He accepts Nathaneal Greene’s offer to be his aide de camp, never meets George Washington other than in passing, and when he hears news that Philip Schuyler’s daughter has married some soldier he can’t find it in him to care. He dies in the Battle of Yorktown wishing he had his command back.

In his sixth life, he tries to re-live it just like he did the first time. He ends up getting stuck in a storm on his way to New York and drowns.

In his seventh, eighth, and ninth lives he doesn’t make it further than the age of twenty-five. In his tenth life he duels Charles Lee and is let go of his service. He had never anticipated the sinking feeling of failure. He dies in a reckless duel with Jefferson before the birth of his third child.

In his eleventh life, he decides he’ll live a simpler existence. He lives the first twenty-five years as they were, declines Washington’s offer to be the Secretary of Treasury, and lives a quiet life with Eliza and eight children. It’s easy, and he’s happy for once, not collapsing under the stress of everything. But Alexander has always aimed for the high points, and a simple life is mind-numbing to him.

In his twelfth life, he takes a shot and decides to befriend Burr. It’s easy at first – he starts to understand where he’s coming from with his philosophy, and things are easier when he keeps his mouth shut. He even manages a tentative barely-friendship with Jefferson, despite their thinly-veiled distaste for each other. His debt plan is passed, he goes on vacation with Eliza, and everything is all good and well until Philip dies.

The grief is too much. The duel still happens, and Alexander still dies from his wounds.

In his thirteenth life, he decides to be reckless. He doesn’t try to dissuade John – he goes to South Carolina with him. The redcoat still kills John, and Alex lives the last three days of his life repeating the mantra in his head – _It was my fault. It was my fault. It was my fault._ He gets killed because he was too busy mourning his best friend to focus on the world around him.

In his fourteenth life, he finally gets it right – so he thinks. He saves John. He lives a happy political career, slowly rising in the ranks, taking care to take breaks and not lose sight of the world around him. He lives to see John and Hercules and Lafayette and Burr all pass on. He lives to see Angelica and Eliza die. He lives to see all his children fall.

He lives another fifty years. And another. And another.

It’s an endless cycle of life, and nobody cares what he wants. He’s merely a relic of a time long in the past. He sees slavery get abolished and wishes John was here to see it, he sees women get voting rights and wishes Angelica was among them. He sees his grandchildren, great-grandchildren, countless descendants grow up.

He sees his story immortalized. He’s there when _Hamilton_ opens at the Richard Rodgers theatre in New York, and he’s watching his life as perfectly as it was when he lived it. But the play ends on a high, with Eliza and Alexander musing legacy. _You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story_. He meets the man who wrote it, a very nice man by all accounts, but a man with no concept of the pain Alexander feels every time he wakes up.

He writes a note to be found by the person who found his body, and hangs himself. _I am so ready to see my Betsey again._

He does see her again, in a fifteenth life and a sixteenth and a seventeenth and an eighteenth. Lives go by, and every time Alexander tries to make the endless cycle stop. In his twenty-third life, he fires at Burr on ten and lives twenty more years of solitude. In his forty-eighth life, he doesn’t write the _Federalist Papers_ , and Congress lives on in a one-party system. In his sixty-seventh life, he becomes a Democratic-Republican. In his eighty-ninth life, he joins King George and is executed as a spy.

He tries everything, normal and outlandish. He doesn’t hesitate from trying anything, even the craziest ideas. Maybe that was the way to break it. Maybe that was the way to finally embrace oblivion.

He doesn’t know what’s out there that the powers above don’t want him to find. Is there a heaven? Does everyone experience this sickening loop of their life? Or was Alexander just chosen to be assigned a fate that was not a fate, a life that was not a life, a death that was not a death? When would it end?

Why him?

He dies so many ways that he can’t even count. He kills himself. He is shot over and over and over again, in duels and on the battlefield and everywhere where shooting a man in broad daylight would not be dishonourable. He dies of countless diseases, some curable, some not. He finds his fate on the ends of knives and poisons.

In his ninety-ninth life, he decides that Aaron Burr has it easy. He befriends everyone who steps in his path. He has intense political discussions with Samuel Seabury, accepts the thousands of slaves of Thomas Jefferson, becomes the dear dinner guest of John Adams. It’s in that life that he realises he cannot have it all, because the quiet Alexander is not a mind that attracts the Schuyler sisters, and the wishy-washy Alexander is not a presence that attracts his friends. He gains political presence and popularity, but he loses the people who make life worth living.

In his hundredth life, he lives with a new philosophy. No longer is it _if you stand for nothing, what do you fall for?_ It’s _when you fall, who will catch you_? He loves many and trusts few, constantly does the best for everyone, tries his hardest to make America the greatest place in the world. He’s a model father, an excellent husband, a true friend.

Maria Reynolds manages to ruin it. And his betrayal is ten times worse in this life. He drowns himself in Eliza’s father’s lake on a vacation, so that he would never have to tell her of his sins.

It becomes unbearable. He hits his two-hundredth life with no concept of what was going on. In his two-hundred-and-fifth life, he kills himself within an hour of his reincarnation, not surving a full day of this cycle.

Life went on. Alexander loses everything that mattered – his drive, his courage, his unbeatable ambition. He loses his friends, and the loves of his life. He loses Eliza – she has no interest in the quiet Revolutionary soldier with dull eyes and the desire to just _die_. He loses John around the hundred-and-fiftieth life, and never tries to rebuild their comraderie. It’s _boring_ , befriending the same people every time.

He leaves America a few times, goes back to the Carribean after the war, goes to England or France or some other place. Each time, it’s hopeless. He becomes exactly the person he had always hated, and is reset back to Christiansted, 1772.

He stops caring. He stops living. Everything is a routine. Every time he goes to sleep he wishes this will be his last time sleeping. Every time he dies he prays to God that he will finally meet his final rest.

His five-hundredth life is played out exactly like his first – at least, what he can remember. He doesn’t try to change anything. He remains the scrappy, hungry young man he was all those lifetimes ago. He lets people die when they were meant to die, and finally, aged forty-nine, he faces Aaron Burr at Weehawken.

He aims his pistol at the sky. He fires. The bullet hits him. He falls. They row him across the Hudson, and he dies with Angelica and Eliza at his side when he finally closes his eyes. _This is it_.

He imagines heaven. He imagines hell. He imagines all the fates God could send him to – he imagines endless oblivion. He imagines a life watching the world from afar, or a life reincarnated into a new body. Anything would be better than this. Anthing would be better than what he had lived for what was probably thousands of years collectively.

_Anything._

He’s learned so much more than he ever wanted to know. He’s become a Jefferson in one life, a Madison in another. He took Seabury’s shoes in one. He inserted himself into Hercules’ life, and John’s, and Lafayette’s. He knows the driving factor behind everyone he ever built a lasting relationship with. He has nothing left to learn, nothing left to gain, nothing left to absorb from the world. He lost everything that made him Alexander, and gained himself in the process.

_This will be the last._

He hears Eliza’s tears as he takes his last breaths, and he smiles at the thought that he will meet her again when she dies, and not the young, impressionable Eliza he met at a ball in 1780. He has grown older than he would ever want.

As a fourteen-year-old in his first life, he longed for death to sweep him off his feet and take him into the pearly gates of heaven. He had been ready to die since his first childhood. But now? Now, Alexander was ready for oblivion, for the final rest.

He had never believed in Heaven, and he had only returned to God after his son’s first death. But he had always hoped that there was something out there other than endless nothingness.

Endless nothingness would be a blessing.

He whispers a prayer, not audible, not for anyone to hear but his own mind. _Please make this my final life. Please take me to eternal rest._ He hopes wryly that his lives as a good God-fearing citizen were enough to take him to Heaven. He hopes that he will finally find solitude. He hopes that he won’t take his final breath now and wake up with the sea beating in his ears and the Carribean wind blowing against his face.

He wakes up in a field that is definitely  _not_ in St. Croix, hears silence that is uncharacteristic of his childhood home, and steps forward. He has finally met his endless oblivion, finally met his heaven, and he couldn't possibly be happier.

He walked forward and pushing away the one question he still had unanswered.

_Why?_

**Author's Note:**

> I have 0 clue what my tenses are doing, and I'm pretty sure some phrases in this are choppy AF, but whatever. Thanks for reading! :)


End file.
